Members of the Utah State Transparency Advisory Board are sifting through five applications for the two newly created public seats on the board.

The new positions were created when the Legislature passed SB77, Sen. Deidre Henderson’s bill expanding the scope of the board from improving access to financial data to all government records. Henderson, R-Spanish Fork, was recently named as the committee’s chair.

The five are Steven Bagley, general manager of the Utah Department of Transportation’s Lester Wire Library and a technical writer; Christopher Bleak, president and CEO of the Utah Association of Public and Charter Schools and former executive director of the Utah Republican Party; former Rep. Holly Richardson, who is also a member of the State Records Committee; Phillip Windley, former state chief information officer; and Jason Williams, a technology consultant and talk-show host on KVNU.

Richardson, Windley and Williams also served on the GRAMA Working Group, which reviewed the Government Records Access and Management Act (GRAMA) in the wake of the HB477 controversy. Richardson also received Black Hole awards from the the national Society of Professional Journalists and its Utah chapter as part of the 2011 Legislature that passed HB477, the bill that would have gutted GRAMA.